“We’re safe now?”

“Should be,” he said. “Safe as anywhere!”

I unbuttoned my mask and pulled it free; Moses shed his quickly, then helped the Morlock. When Nebogipfel’s little face was exposed, Oldfield, Bond and Filby all stared quite openly — I could not blame them! — until Moses helped him restore his cap and goggles to their appointed sites.

“Where are we?” I asked Filby.

“Don’t you recognize it?” Filby waved his hand at the darkness beyond the window.

“It’s Hammersmith, old man. We’ve just crossed the river.” Hilary Bond explained to me, “It is the Hammersmith Gate. We have reached the Dome of London.”

The London Dome!

Nothing in my own time had prepared me for this stupendous feat of construction. Picture it: a great pie-dish of concrete and steel almost two miles across, stretching across the city from Hammersmith to Stepney, and from Islington to Clapham… The streets were broken everywhere by pillars, struts and buttresses which thrust down into the London clay, dominating and confining the populace like the legs of a crowd of giants.

The train moved on, beyond Hammersmith and Fulham, and deeper into the Dome. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I began to see how the street-lights traced out an image of a London I could still recognize: “Here is Kensington High Street, beyond this fence! And is that Holland Park?” — and so forth. But for all the familiar landmarks and street names, this was a new London: a London of permanent night, a city which could never enjoy the glow of the June sky outside — but a London which had accepted all this as the price for survival, Filby told me; for bombs and torpedoes would roll off that massive Roof, or burst in the air harmlessly, leaving Cobbett’s “Great Wen” unmarked beneath.

Everywhere, Filby said, the cities of men — which had once blazed with light, turning the night-side of our turning world into a glowing jewel — had been covered by such brooding, obscuring Shells; now, men hardly moved between the great Dome-cities, preferring to cower in their man-made Darkness.

Our new train line appeared to have been slashed through the old pattern of streets. The roads we passed over were quite crowded, but with people on foot or on bicycles; I saw no carriages, drawn either by horse or by motor, as I had expected. There were even rickshaws! — light carriages, pulled by sweating, scrawny Cockneys, squirming around the obstacles posed by the Dome’s pillars.

Watching the crowds from the window of my slowing train, I caught a sense, despite the general bustle and busy-ness, of despondency, downheartedness, disillusion. I saw down-turned heads, slumped shoulders, lined, weary faces; there was a certain doggedness, it seemed to me, as people went about their lives; but there seemed to me — and it was not surprising — little joy.

It was striking that there were no children, anywhere to be seen. Bond told me that the schools were mostly underground now, for greater protection against the possibility of bombs, while the parents worked in the munitions factories, or in the huge aerodromes which had sprung up around London, at Balham, Hackney and Wembley. Well, perhaps that was a safer arrangement — but what a bleak place the city was without the laughter of running children! — as even I, a contented bachelor, was prepared to concede. And what kind of preparation for life were those poor subterranean mites receiving?

Again, I thought, my travels had landed me in a world of rayless obscurity — a world a Morlock would have enjoyed. But the people who had built this great edifice were no Morlocks: they were my own species, cowed by War into relinquishing the Light which was their birthright! A deep and abiding depression settled over me, a mood which was to linger for much of my stay in 1938.

Here and there, I saw rather more direct evidence of the horror of War. In Kensington High Street I saw one chap making his way along the road — he had to be helped, by a thin young woman at his side — his lips were thin and stretched, and his eyes were like beads in shrunken sockets. The skin of his face was a pattern of marks in purple and white on the underlying gray.

Filby sniffed when I pointed this out. “War Burns,” he said. “They always look the same… An aerial fighter, probably — a young gladiator, whose exploits we all adore when the Babble Machines shout about them! — and yet where is there for them to go afterwards?” He glanced at me, and laid a withered hand on my arm. “I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, my dear chap. I’m still the Filby you used to know. It’s just — God! — it’s just that one has to steel oneself.”

Most of the old buildings of London seemed to have survived, although, I saw, some of the taller constructions had been torn down to allow the concrete carapace to grow over — I wondered if Nelson’s Column still stood! — and the new buildings were small, beetling and drab. But there were some scars left by the early days of the War, before the Dome’s completion: great bombsites, like vacant eye-sockets, and mounds of rubble which no one had yet had the wit or energy to fill.

The Dome reached its greatest height of two hundred feet or so directly above Westminster at the heart of London; as we neared the center of town, I saw beams of brilliant lights flickering up from the central streets and splashing that universal Roof with illumination. And everywhere, protruding from the streets of London and from immense foundation-rafts on the river, there were those pillars: rough-hewn, crowding, with splayed and buttressed bases — ten thousand concrete Atlases to support that roof, pillars which had turned London into an immense Moorish temple.

I wondered if the basin of chalk and soft clay in which London rested could support this colossal weight! What if the whole arrangement were to sink into the mud, dragging its precious cargo of millions of lives with it? I thought with some wistfulness of that Age of Buildings which was to come, when the glimpses I had seen of the mastery of gravity would render a construction like this Dome into a trivial affair…

Yet, despite the crudity and evident haste of its construction, and the bleakness of its purpose, I found myself impressed by the Dome. Because it was all hewn out of simple stone and fixed to the London clay with little more than the expertise of my own century, that brooding edifice was more remarkable to me than all the wonders I had seen in the Year A.D. 657,208!

We traveled on, but we were evidently close to journey’s end, for the train moved at little more than walking pace. I saw there were shops open, but their windows were scarcely a blaze of light; I saw dummies wearing more of the drab clothes of the day, and shoppers peering through patched-up glass panes. There was little left of luxury, it seemed, in this long and bitter War.

The train drew to a halt. “Here we are,” said Bond. “This is Canning Gate: just a few minutes’ walk to Imperial College.” Trooper Oldfield pushed at the carriage door — it opened with a distinct pop, as if the pressure in this Dome were high — and a flood of noise burst in over us. I saw more soldiers, these dressed in the drab olive battle-dress of infantrymen, waiting for us on the platform.

So, grasping my borrowed gas-mask, I stepped out into the London Dome.

The noise was astonishing! — that was my first impression. It was like being in some immense crypt, shared with millions of others. A hubbub of voices, the squealing of train wheels and the hum of trams: all of it seemed to rattle around that vast, darkened Roof and shower down over me. It was immensely hot — hotter than the Raglan had been. There was a warm array of scents, not all of them pleasant: of cooking food, of ozone from some machinery, of steam and oil from the train — and, above all, of people, millions of them breathing and perspiring their way through that great, enclosed blanket of air.